In June of 2015, my first full-length poetry collection, Every Door Recklessly Ajar, was published by Cayuga Lake Books of Ithaca, New York. A few months later in August, Mountain Writers hosted a book launch and reading for me at Vie de Bohème…
Found Poem: Gratitude Posts from a Dying Friend
Below is a found poem that was part of a Zoom memorial service celebration for a neighbor during the isolating years of the pandemic. I created it from the amazing trove of gratitude posts my neighbor made over the years before she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer…
Derek Walcott, Poem of Peace
A poem today, actually. Love this one.
Love After Love
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
…
Year of the Rabbit in Poetry: The Selected Levis by Larry Levis
I spent the past week reading over 200 pages of poetry from all of Larry Levis’s volumes over the years. In 1996, Levis died of …
Poetry: Walt Whitman’s Election Day, November 1884
From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1891-92): ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884. If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest …
Buzzin’ Fly
It is a gorgeous summer morning. I have the screen door open so the cats can mosey in and out. Of course, this allows the flies to visit as well. One particularly large and obnoxious one is flitting about the dining room as I type. This too shall pass….
Poetry: Brilliance and Truth in Four Short Lines
I read this poem by Daniel Tobin in a recent issue of Poetry. Talk about economy of words. Wow. Speaks volumes, I think. The brilliance …
Blogging through the Blues
Finally today, the clouds over my psyche, my perception of what is now my life, lift for a host of reasons—hormones shifting, new allergy drugs working, sun returning even if only for fifteen minutes to light up this morning in my life. The weekend is an artist’s date of sorts—heading to Medford/Ashland with a friend and the matinee of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival on Saturday. A break most welcome, a cultural outing sorely needed…
Roger Housden’s Ten Poems Series
A friend turned me on to the four-book series of poetry collected by Roger Housden. Seems the first volume, Ten Poems to Change Your Life came out in the middle of 2001, with the others, Ten Poems to Open Your Heart and Ten Poems to Set You Free, following close behind…
150-Year-Old Words to Live By
Words to buoy the soul on a sunny February day of snow slowly melting from the winter-green grass and the drip-drip accompaniment from rain gutter eaves:
Walt Whitman in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass—
“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men—go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families—re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.”…
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